The cannery was shut down for several days while the steam piping was replaced, and a small memorial was held for the dead. Jon noticed that none of the stone men attended. He was told that their families would be compensated when he asked about it, but Jon knew how cheaply the dwarves valued human lives.

This allowed him to see the other half of the building filled with its strange belts and crushing machines, but only briefly. They took all the meat they produced and put it in tiny metal tins stamped with the contents and date. He’d opened dozens of those cans in the deeps, but it felt strange to see them actually being made before his eyes in a dirty building filled with oil and steam.

Jon thought momentarily that he would have to work on those terrifyingly quick lines, but in the end, there were shut down too when the boiler was bled off. Then everyone was set to a thousand minor tasks, from breaking down old crates for firewood to loading wagons with thousands of cans that would be taken to the closest station to be sent to the deeps. It was dull work, but it was almost as easy as shucking and processing seafood had been, and he did his part, slowly saving toward getting his boots fixed, so he could leave.

That was a task that had become more urgent now. Not because of the work, or even the steam explosion, though, but because of Rian’s continual questions. Jon had little to fear from steam, but he had a lot to fear should his identity be discovered. Should the dwarves ever find out, he had no doubt they wouldn’t rest until they’d tracked him down, and there wasn’t a chance in hell he was letting that happen.

Still, the other man didn’t relent. Before, Jon had just been the new guy that he was showing around, but now he was a mystery, and for the dull life of the workers here, that was an irresistible thing. Where was he really from? What did he do before he got here? Where did he get those scars? In between shifts and at meal times, the man was a font of questions, but Jon couldn’t easily avoid him. Not only was he on the same crew, but he was the only one in this place that wasn’t a complete stranger, and amidst the desperate, flinty-eyed people that worked the cannery with him, that was worth something, too.

Finally, when the entire belching, wheezing building got back up to speed, and the boilers reached the proper temperature, work resumed, but when Jon walked back in, he wasn’t all that reassured to see that they’d replaced the two sections of pipe that made up the ruptured flange, but the dwarves had left all of the other rusting sections in place, and none of them were in any better shape than the rest.

“Relax,” Rian said, patting him on the back. “That sort of incident only happens like once a year. Twice, tops, so I’d say our odds are pretty good, and as long as I stand next to you, I’d say they’re even better.”

“How can you live like this,” Jon asked as he got to work, casting another glance at the worst section of steam piping near him. “It’s like living with the executioner breathing down your neck.”

“Well, what else would we do?” Rian asked, not looking up from the oyster in his hand. Now that they finally had a chance to make some real money, he was working like a man possessed, which made Jon wonder just how much the other man had lost in dice over the last few days. “If you live in the mountains, then it’s the specter of winter, and if you live in the country, it’s the shadow of bandits or the ghost of taxes and famine. Everywhere you go, something is looking to ruin your day. At least here, they pay well for the privilege.”

“But don’t you think you’d be happier if you spent less money and lived somewhere that wasn’t going to kill you one day?” Jon asked again, undeterred. “What is it you even do with all that money?”

“That’s a more complicated question than you think, mister lucky,” Rian answered, smirking. “I’ll show you after shift. For now, these shells ain’t going to open themselves.”

Jon wasn’t exactly sure he wanted to see what kind of gambling den Rian slunk off to after work when Jon went back to the flophouse he stayed in, be he supposed it couldn’t hurt, just once. He spent the rest of the day focused on the task at hand, though he had a bit of an advantage that none of the rest of the members of his crew did. Each cart of shellfish was blasted with searing, several-hundred-degree steam for almost a minute before they were given to a crew.

The heat loosened up the shells, making them infinitely easier to open, but it never penetrated to the bottom. So, the top layer was practically cooked by the end, and the main hazard there was that you might burn yourself if you grabbed the wrong shell too quickly, even if most of those shells sat open, just waiting to be scrapped. The middle layer was loosened and manageable, but the bottom layer though - it was still as cold as it had been when they’d been brought off the boat. Consequently, there was a lot of prying and griping when they got down to the end of a cart as everyone struggled to open the last few, though.

Jon didn’t have those problems, though. Pulling a touch of heat out of the shell he was going to do next kept him from burning himself, and adding a bit of fire to a cold clam was enough to get it to open pretty easily. It was unfair, of course, but life wasn’t fair, and if the dwarves were going to run all this deadly steam within feet of the men doing the work, then he was going to take advantage of it.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

. . .

When the final whistle blew, Jon went to dinner with Rian for more chowder as always, but rather than making himself scarce or wondering where his friend disappeared to, he stuck with him, and after Rian stuffed his pockets with rolls, he made his way to the waterfront. This was the oldest part of the tiny town and the one that Jon had least visited. Fishermen lived here in the shadow of the cannery, and many of them had roots back to when this area was still a freshwater lake if the rumors were to be believed.

Until now, Jon had assumed that Rian lived in one of the many boarding houses along with most of the other men. The way he talked, he was just another stray from one of the cities, but now he wondered if there was more to it than that.

He quickly found out when Rian knocked before entering a small two-story cottage that had seen better days and stepped inside. “Evening Pol, evening Fran - is Mara upstairs?” he asked, blurring the lines further. For a moment before Rian had opened his mouth, he’d thought that these people were his parents, but that was obviously not the case.

The older man looked at the two of them and nodded, “She’s upstairs with Elise. I don’t think she’s doing too well. She didn’t help with the nets at all today.”

“Alright,” Rian said calmly, flipping the man a copper eighth, “if she’s not feeling up to it, then she doesn’t have to. You know how this works.”

The man glowered as he caught the coin, but Rian ignored him and turned to go upstairs, leaving Jon to follow awkwardly in his wake. Up the narrow stairs, there was a small dusty garret with a heavily angled roof and exposed timbers that was mostly filled with junk, but there was a space cleared for a pallet, and there were two women sitting on it, chatting.

The one that must have been Mara bore a strong resemblance to Rian. They had the same mouse brown hair and thin aquiline noses, but the other girl with darker hair was obviously unrelated, and as soon as Jon met her eyes, he felt his heart flutter in a way he thought he was no longer capable of since the twin heart breaks of Claire and Anda.

“Jon, this is my sister Mara and her friend Elise,” Rian said. “She used to work in the cannery on the other side with all those belts, but well - the sea air does her good, so now she mends nets to stay busy until I get off work like a good sister.”

“Not today…” she started before she was interrupted by a coughing fit. “Today, getting out of bed seems unlikely.”

“Well, there’s no problem with that,” he said, smoothing over any awkwardness as he moved a chair aside and opened the window. “The sea breeze can come to you just as easily in here as it can out on the pier.”

After that, they all chatted for a bit until the light from the only window waned, and Mara’s strength started to fade. They all said their goodbyes then, but the most Jon managed to say to the beautiful dark-haired girl was, “Ummm, hello.” Even after they left, he spent a good portion of the night kicking himself that he hadn’t done something to seize that opportunity to try to get her attention. He told himself it was because he didn’t want to interrupt the man’s time with his obviously ill sister.

Jon didn’t bring it up when they left, but Rian did almost immediately. “She has good days and bad ones, you understand? So I work as much as I can because I have to. She wouldn’t last a month these days without her medicine, and that’s three or four silver eighths a quarter.”

“That’s awful,” Jon said, quickly doing the math in his head. Maybe a fifth of everything that Rian made every month went to just that one expense, and if you factored in food and board for two at the going rate on the Pearl Islet, that was everything he made and then some. “What’s wrong with her?”

“Nothing,” Rian said. “At least nothing before we came to this place. Then she got sick. No one knows why. The sea air? The dirty environment? Certainly not the strange chemicals the dwarves use to preserve their food, though, right?”

Jon almost asked why they didn’t just leave, but he quickly answered that one himself. They couldn’t. Instead, he asked, “So then, what are you going to do now?”

“Me?” he said with a laugh. “I’m going to show up, do my job, and save every penny I can to keep my dear sister alive, and if the worst should ever happen… well, I’m going to burn this whole place down. That would be a lot easier to do if a certain fire blood decided to stick around after he got his boots fixed.”

Jon had been ready to tell him not to joke about such things, but the words died in his throat when Rian fixed him with a teary-eyed star of rage and certainty. “Does anyone else know?” he asked.

“Jon, besides me, no one else cares you exist!” Rian said, suddenly pushing away his anger to enthusiasm in an unnerving way. “Whatever you’re running from, or whoever you think is after you, I’m telling you. No one cares who you are here as long as you show up and work fast, and the second you can’t do both of those things, they’ll toss you right out on your ear.”

Jon nodded ruefully as he considered that. Rian was making an excellent argument that he’d been worried about the wrong things all along.

“Remember, no one cares if you live or die as long as you get paid,” he said, taking Jon to a different building he’d never been to before. “All they care about is whether they get paid.”